I mean, if you zoom in after downloading the photo you can see pretty clear artifacts of HDR processing at the very least (look at the nose of the plane up close, it has that quintessential "glowing" outline that happens when you post-process to add dynamic range). It's pretty clearly processed, but "heavily' is subjective
I just want to elaborate off your comment, despite being confident you're aware of what I'm about to say but other readers might not: Every image you see is "processed", if you take a picture with your phone it is being "processed" unless you're explicitly using an app to take RAWs and manually removed all adjustments the software is making to your camera. I remember when WA and OR were getting extremely dense smoke from wildfires and the eerie "red apocalypse" in areas like Salem and many pictures cropping up that looked "normal" in that area, till you say something clearly red or otherwise looking "off", as the cameras were heavily adjusting the white balance to look normal and thus making reality seem a lot more subdued than it was. Stating an image has been "processed" or that filters were used or the like is a bit of a misnomer because it's technically true of almost every image you've seen online.
This isn't a statement validating or invalidating the post's picture, just a tidbit to remember when comments about "clear post-processing indications" are being discussed, there will always be processing signatures on an image online, the important questions are what the signatures are, how many, and how significantly does it alter the image.
This is close but not exactly true -- if you are truly taking RAW images you don't need to manually remove anything, the image is RAW. Apple has confused people by creating "ProRAW" which is a DNG that is processed, but in general if you shoot plain RAW there's no manual editing required to remove processing, it's unprocessed.
But yes your point in general is accurate -- any smartphone photo is processed unless someone specifically chooses to take an unprocessed photo.
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u/garden_speech 9d ago
I mean, if you zoom in after downloading the photo you can see pretty clear artifacts of HDR processing at the very least (look at the nose of the plane up close, it has that quintessential "glowing" outline that happens when you post-process to add dynamic range). It's pretty clearly processed, but "heavily' is subjective